Posts Tagged ‘Owen Paterson’

What an acrimonious reshuffle this has turned out to be! Over the weekend the sacked Ken Clarke and Dominic Grieve, and the effectively passed-over Liam Fox, have all gone on record with warnings to t...
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Reshuffles are always difficult. Many of Tony Blair's, for example, were unplanned – the result of resignations. And there is often, in the middle of them, a heart-sink moment when you remember ...
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There's a lot of unseemly green gloating going on at the sacking of Owen Paterson as environment secretary. Quite apart from the distasteful delight with which environmental groups are kicking the man...
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In case you hadn’t noticed, David Cameron is Prime Minister. That’s been the message of the reshuffle so far: Cameron is in charge and he wants to fight the 2015 election on his own terms. That me...
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Tonight a local council will decide whether severely to embarrass the Prime Minister in his own backyard. For if the West Oxfordshire District Council's planning committee gives the go ahead for a new...
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Is the tide changing on climate change within the Tory party? A speech by Michael Gove, launching a report by the Conservative Environment Network, is being hailed as a "gamechanger". The Education Se...
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For organisations whose raison d’être rests on being seen as the good guys, environmental pressure groups can turn pretty nasty at times. Take, for example, the ill-timed campaign now being conduct...
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I don’t think you can appreciate what flooding means other than from up close. On TV, it can look almost jolly: children being towed to school in dinghies, pensioners bringing the shopping home in w...
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Ed Miliband has dramatically increased the level of political debate on climate change and the floods by linking the two and invoking national security. In my weekend Telegraph column I point out that...
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Who'd be Lord Smith, the much-maligned Chairman of the Environment Agency? Yesterday, in his first press conference for 238 days, the Prime Minister again conspicuously failed to back him, after he ha...
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